Cocktail families

Templates, not recipes

A classic list carries hundreds of names and perhaps seven shapes. Nineteenth-century bars sorted drinks into families — sour, fizz, collins, julep, flip, cocktail — and each family was a fixed set of relationships. Name the spirit that goes into the shape and you have named the drink. Once the shapes are visible the list gets shorter: most classics are one template with a single part swapped out.

What follows takes the seven most useful apart. Each one is a cast of parts, and then what happens when you recast one of them. For how these recipes travelled, see the history of the cocktail; for the tools and the hands, see home bar basics.

The sour: spirit, citrus, sweetener

The sour is the most productive template in the book. Three parts: a base spirit, a citrus juice, something sweet. Proportions vary from bar to bar; a common way to write it is two parts spirit, one part citrus, one part syrup, adjusted for the strength of the spirit and for how sharp the fruit happens to be that week. The method barely changes: shake hard with ice until the tin frosts, then strain.

Change the spirit and you change the drink. Rum with citrus and syrup is a Daiquiri — classically lime. Whiskey with lemon juice and syrup is a Whiskey Sour. Pisco with lemon juice, syrup and egg white is a Pisco Sour.

The sweet part is just as movable. Replace the syrup with a liqueur and the sour grows a whole branch of its own: the Sidecar is cognac, triple sec and lemon juice; the Margarita puts tequila where the cognac was and salts the rim; the White Lady uses gin. One skeleton, three drinks nobody would confuse. Their origins are disputed — accounts point to Paris, London and the Mexican border in the first decades of the twentieth century, and little of it can be settled.

Push further out. Honey instead of syrup gives the Bee's Knees. Cranberry juice alongside the citrus gives the Cosmopolitan. Four ingredients in equal parts give the Last Word. Egg white thickens the texture and tightens the foam, as in the Clover Club; drinks with egg are usually dry-shaken without ice first, then shaken again with it. The New York Sour is a finished sour with red wine floated on top — one extra movement, one new drink.

The highball: spirit and something long

Two parts: a measure of spirit and a mixer to carry it. The method is to build the drink in the glass — fill with ice, pour the spirit, top up, lift once with the spoon. Nothing is shaken, so the bubbles survive.

Gin with tonic water is a Gin Tonic. Vodka with orange juice is a Screwdriver. Rum with cola and citrus is a Cuba Libre, classically with lime. Vodka with ginger beer and lime juice is a Moscow Mule, traditionally served in a copper mug. Change one part again and a second row appears: grapefruit for the Salty Dog and the Paloma, cranberry and grapefruit for the Sea Breeze. Put a bitter aperitif and sweet red vermouth where the spirit sits, top with soda, and you have an Americano.

A highball has few variables, which magnifies all of them: how much ice, how you pour, how cold everything was to begin with. Too little ice melts faster than too much, and an unchilled glass costs you the first mouthful.

The old fashioned: spirit, sugar, bitters

The definition of a cocktail printed in an American newspaper in 1806 — spirits, sugar, water, bitters — describes what we now call an Old Fashioned. The name arrived later than the drink: as mixed drinks grew more elaborate, drinkers who wanted the original had to ask for it the old-fashioned way.

Every part of that relationship can be recast. The Sazerac — cognac in the older version, rye in most bars today — rinses the glass with absinthe, so the aroma comes from the vessel rather than the liquid. The Champagne Cocktail replaces the water with champagne: a sugar cube soaked in bitters sits at the bottom and the bubbles dissolve it as you drink. Swap the bitters for fresh mint and the cubes for crushed ice and you arrive at the Mint Julep. Muddle the sugar together with citrus and you are on the road to the Caipirinha and the Mojito — the second of which is then topped with soda, standing with one foot in the highball family.

Stirred drinks: spirit and aromatised wine

The fourth template hands the sweetening job to an aromatised wine. Vermouth brings sugar, alcohol and a cupboard of botanicals at once, so these drinks run to two or three ingredients and still taste furnished. With no juice or egg to emulsify, the method changes to stirring: clear liquid, softer texture.

A Dry Martini is gin and vermouth, in ratios that have run from nearly equal to barely there. A Manhattan is whiskey, sweet red vermouth and bitters. The Martinez is often described as the Martini's ancestor, though accounts differ. The equal-parts versions are the easiest to hold in your head: a Negroni is one part each of gin, Campari and sweet red vermouth, and the story goes that it began as an Americano with gin in place of the soda. Put whiskey where the gin was and it becomes a Boulevardier. Then the Vieux Carré, the Vesper, the Dirty Martini — each a single part away from a neighbour.

Fizzes and collinses: the sour, lengthened

Top a sour with soda water and you have a fizz. A Gin Fizz is shaken, strained and topped with soda; the head does not last, so it is meant to be drunk as it lands. A John Collins uses much the same ingredients in a tall glass packed with ice, which makes it a slow drink that thins out as it goes.

The most laborious member is the Ramos Fizz — cream, egg white and orange flower water, famous for the length of its shake, the foam stiff enough to hold up the soda poured through it. The Bramble goes the other way: a gin sour over crushed ice with liqueur drizzled on top, flavour seeping downwards.

Flips and creamy drinks

The word flip once meant something else entirely: beer and spirit heated with a red-hot iron. The modern flip is cold, and its shape is spirit or fortified wine, a whole egg or a yolk, and sugar, shaken to a thick texture and grated over with nutmeg. Porto Flip is the standard example, port wine with egg yolk and cognac.

Replace the egg with cream and you reach the other half of the family: one part spirit or liqueur, one part flavouring liqueur, one part cream. The Alexander is cognac, a sweet liqueur and cream, and is said to have been made with gin in its early days. The Grasshopper swaps in crème de menthe and white cacao liqueur, which supplies both the colour and the name. Golden Dream comes out of the same mould. Cream drinks want a harder shake than a plain sour; under-shaken, the fat never emulsifies and the drink separates on the tongue.

Sparkling drinks: wine as the long part

Put a sparkling wine where the highball keeps its mixer and both the aroma and the strength rise. The French 75 is a gin sour topped with champagne, named after a French 75mm field gun of the First World War. The Bellini is peach puree and sparkling wine, said to have been invented at a bar in Venice and named after the painter. The Mimosa is sparkling wine and orange juice in equal measure. Kir is white wine with blackcurrant liqueur, named after a mayor of Dijon, and the version made with sparkling wine instead is just as common. The Old Cuban shakes a Mojito and tops it with champagne; the Russian Spring Punch puts blackcurrant, lemon and sparkling wine together.

The family keeps one rule in common: the wine goes in last, down the side of the glass, and nothing is stirred afterwards.

Swapping one part

Templates are not for memorising, they are for extrapolating. Take a drink you know and recast one role — the base, the sweetener, the citrus, the ice, the long part — and predict where it will go before you make it. The vocabulary for describing the result is on the flavour tags page.

One thing never follows automatically: the ratio. A new ingredient brings its own sugar and its own acidity, so the measures have to be found again. Make it once at the original proportions as a reference, then change one thing at a time; otherwise you will not know which change did what.